Page 93 of Nothing Less than Magic
“Don’t you get it? He divorced me. He left me for someone else. He’s probably the only man in the entertainment industry who left his wife for an older woman. She’s not even attractive.” She tops off her glass with the bottle, and her hand is shaking. “I loved him. Do you understand that? I loved him, and he left me.”
I’m speechless. “I didn’t know that,” I manage to say after a few minutes of absorbing what she just told me. “I’d always figured that you left him.”
“You know why you didn’t know he was the one who wanted a divorce? You know why? Because you didn’t fucking ask. You jetted off to Boston or Memphis or Timbuktu, or wherever you go to help people you don’t know to save their marriages. Yet you couldn’t be bothered with mine. Or me.”
“That’s not true.” But the thing is, it is. Everything she’s said.
I try to remember three years ago. I try to remember where I was and what I was doing when Lolly told me she and Brent were breaking up. And nothing stands out. I have absolutely no recollection of us having any kind of momentous talk about it. Sure, there were conversations, snippets about custody of the children, who got what, where Brent would live. The logistics.
But nothing aboutwhy.
I’d always assumed it was Lolly who’d precipitated the dissolution of their marriage. That she’d married Brent for security and children. I suppose I never gave their divorce much weight because I never took their marriage seriously.
“Tell me what happened.”
“There’s nothing to tell. He met someone else. Someone who was his intellectual equivalent”—she makes quotes in the air with her fingers—“someone who knows the lyrics to Beatles songs. He actually said that; can you believe it? He said he loved her in a way he could never love me. And then he left.”
“I’m so sorry, Lolly. I had no idea.”
“That might’ve been the worst part.” She puts her glass down and locks eyes with me. “It was happening all over again. Mom and Dad dying, you leaving to go away to school, Uncle Sylvester always working. If it weren’t for the kids, I’d be completely alone.”
“You’re not alone. You’ve got me. I know it hasn’t seemed like that, but it’s going to be different now.”
“I loved him, Chelsea. I know it’s hard for you to see that, but I loved him. I still love him.” She crumples in my arms, sobbing.
I brush her hair with my hand like I used to do in that first year after Mom and Dad were gone. She would crawl into bed with me and cry, afraid that she was forgetting what they looked like, how they smelled, their voices. There was a box under my bed with their pictures, and we’d try to make out their faces in the dark. We’d try to inhale the lingering scent of them, even though it had already faded.
“It hurts so much,” she says between her hiccupping sobs. “It’s like a hole in my heart that never heals.”
“It will,” I say. “With time, it’ll get better.”
“But it’s already been three years.” She pulls away, and I instantly feel bereft of her weight, of her warmth. Of our impossible history together.
“I don’t think you can measure grief in terms of years. I meant time in the abstract.”
“Can you just speak English, please?”
“What I’m trying to say is that it won’t hurt this way forever. You’ll move past it. Maybe you’ll fall in love again, maybe you won’t. But you’ll find something in your life that fills the hole. Something wonderful.”
“How can you be so sure? There’s no guarantee. For all you know, I’ll die a shriveled-up old lady with a broken heart. Taylor and Luna will have to send me away to a special home for sad, pathetic people.”
“Now you’re just being dramatic.”
“Seriously, though, how do you know?”
It’s the old crystal ball question. I remember something Knox told me in my dream about how in the long run, it wasn’t Sienna he wanted, it was the picture of the life he thought she represented. Those words come back to me every time I’m with Austin. And I have to question if it’s the same with Lolly and Brent. If he’s merely a picture of the life she wants.
“No one knows anything for sure,” I say. “But let me ask you something. Do you want to be happy and live your best life?”
“My best life?” She rolls her eyes. “You’re an idiot. But yes, I want to be happy.”
“Then let’s make that your goal for the new year.”
“Just like that.” She snaps her fingers. “A New Year’s resolution to be happy. Poof. It’s that easy.”
“I never said it was easy. In my experience, anything worth having is really, really hard.”
My mind turns to the ridiculous mockups for the Chelsea Knight inspirational calendar sitting on my desk in San Francisco. The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is throw them in the trash.
